The Unseemly

Chapter 3 - Welcome Home

Chapter Three - Welcome Home

As the door closes, the scene went from dark and gloomy, then bright and surprisingly clean. Outside, the house was abandoned. Somehow inside, there was working electricity, along with being chilly, fully furnished. There was a strong aroma of peanut butter cookies that lingered in the somehow fresh air; none of this made sense. Chimmy and the gang could only stand still and observe; what did they just walk into.

"What the hell is going on, Chim?" Rozzi whispers, finally breaking the eerie silence. "No one lives here, so how are the lights on?" He continued rambling.

Voices carry over from the other room; it sounds like a young boy and girl having a conversation from what they can tell.

"Anyone home?" Rozzi shouts to the unseen voices. Barbie cranks him behind his head, forcing him to silent.

"Why would you do that?" Gilly hisses. The voices suddenly surrendered and muted the mysterious house once again. Footsteps began getting louder with each passing moment. Chimmy sees a closet ahead of them and signals everyone to follow his lead.

"Hurry up!" Chimmy hisses opening the bright white door. "Maybe whoever is here didn't notice us," he says, closing the door behind them.

"Why the hell did I let you talk me into this?" Gilly mutters. "EVERY FUCKIN' TIME."

THUD...THUD!

"Barbie, what should we do?" Rozzi asks, terrified. "You always know!"

"I don't know!" She replies, just as scared as her dopey friend.

THUD... THUD... THUD!

The doorknob slowly turns; each second felt like hours. Chimmy regretted bringing his friends with him. He knew they would follow him; they would follow him through a burning building (if he asked them politely). The bright light from the hallway begins to fill the closet; the door slowly opens, exposing Chimmy and his friends to the unknown voices.

Chimmy recognized one of the two bodies that blocked the narrow doorway. From the awkward stance down to his one shoe, it could only be his missing friend. Who was his chatty companion alongside him? He didn't recognize her at all, and she didn't look alive.

"Douglas? Is that really you?" Chimmy calls out. He gives a signal to his friends to stay back.

"Of course, it's me, Chim; who else would I be?" Douglas answers, puzzled, with a confused look upon his bright red cheeks.

"Who's your friend?" Chimmy asks, feeling uneasy after finishing his sentence.

"You can see her too!" Douglas shrieks. "I honestly thought I was going crazy, Chim," he says, stepping back into the hallway.

Now the rest of the gang joins in to find out what is going on. "What do you mean by see Sammy too?" Barbie says, finally getting enough courage to get out of the jammed closet. "This is my sister, Sammy," he says. "But she is dead, and we all can see her." Douglas continues calculating the scenarios in order.

"By dead, you mean... Not alive?" Rozzi asks, raising his hand as if he's in school waiting for a teacher to call upon him.

Douglas tries to explain what happened the night he went missing, the real story, not the made-up story the local newspaper was fabricating. The second day the paper was printed, an article suggested that he was eaten by a bear, that's why a body was never found. There had been no bears killed before that -- because bears were gone from Granite Bay, even all of Connecticut long before cars were invented to deplete the already thin population. By 1850, most of the state's land had been cleared for farming, destroying bear habitat.

"A bear?" Douglas laughs hysterically; the ghost of his sister mimics his gestures and joins him.

"Wait -- what do you mean I'm missing?" He hurriedly remembers that he was supposed to be on his way home.

"Douglas, you've been missing for thirteen days!" Chimmy explains. He fills Douglas in on everything that has been going on.

"I've only been here for two hours! What do you mean for thirteen days!" Douglas begins pacing back and forth. "My parents... Oh, my mother said she wouldn't live through this again; she can't.

"Your mother is fine," Barbie says, reassuring it with Chimmy.

"They haven't given up on you," Chimmy adds. "They've been raising hell at the police station."

"I want to see mommy and daddy Dougie," the spirit interrupts.

"I know me too, Sammy, listen here- I have to talk to my friends REALLY quick, super-fast." Douglas kneels talking to his sister. "Don't move, okay."

"Okay," she responds solidly.

"There was another kid who arrived about thirty minutes after I got here," he says, scratching his unmade hair. "Have any young girls gone missing?"

"They did issue a seven o'clock curfew for anyone under sixteen about three days ago," Gilly speaks up. "It could be the adults are covering it up, trying not to scare us kids.

"She can't leave," the spirit says, surprising the group.

"I thought I said don't move Sammy," Douglas hisses. "You never did listen."

"Why can't she leave?" Barbie asks the spirit.

"They're hungry. She's weak." The spirit began singing the words annoyingly.

They're hungry; she's weak.

They're hungry; she's weak.

They're hungry; she's weak.

"Your sister might be a little crazy, Doug," Rozzi mutters.

"Who's they?" The group asks simultaneously.

"The Unseemly," she says bluntly.

"We need to get out of here, Chim," Barbie says. "Remember, time is different in this house. We've already been here five minutes," she reminds them all.

They run to the door to find that the doorknob is missing. The lights which illuminated seconds before now were deceased; the house appeared to match its outer attire. Gilly runs through the broken door, knocking it entirely off its hinges.

The full moon lit up the night sky revealing the path that led them to this house of hell. Looking back, the spirit of Sammy stood in half boarded empty windows; waving out to her new friends. They immediately flee, with Douglas leading the way. Chimmy knew precisely where he was taking them to. For the first time, they no longer feared the Pathway to Hell. It was real--you bet your ass it was real, as accurate as all of them. The House of Forgotten Time was that special something that would bond them together for all their lives, however long that may be.

Once they stop sprinting, they see Douglas' house ahead. "Welcome home, buddy," Chimmy says, hugging his once lost friend.

"Thanks, we'll see you later," hugging his friend back.